The Tin Shingle Blog

The Katherine Heigl vs Duane Reade situation is very recognizable to a small business owner:

A celebrity like Katherine Heigl is spotted in a photo wearing a product, or shopping at a store, or reading a book.

The owner of that product, book, store, or whatever the entity gets so excited, spazzes out, feels  as though they have "arrived", and want to share the celebrity validation with the world. Like Duane Reade did when they tweeted a twitpic photo of Katherine Heigl exiting a Duane Reade store with shopping bags in hand. Which read something like this:

“Love a quick #DuaneReade run? Even @KatieHeigl can’t resist shopping #NYC‘s favorite drugstore http://bit.ly/1gLHctI ”

The business owner takes to social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and blogs about it on their website and adds the photo to their press page. To have a celebrity endorse something is the mecca for many business owners.

STOP RIGHT THERE!
And therein lies the problem. Endorsement. All of this validation means that a celebrity approves of something for sale, and that validation can boost the profits of a business when suddenly everyone wants to be just like that celebrity and buy the product. When a photo is used for advertising or trade purposes, and there is no written consent, there could be a very big, expensive problem, says NYC attorney Anthony Verna, who specializes in intellectual property and trademark law.

"Not getting permission from any person to use his or her image or likeness in an advertisement only opens the door for liability," Verna said. "The more famous a person, the bigger the liability." In fact, Verna was a guest expert in a Tin Shingle TuneUp to bring awareness to our small business members about when it's safe to use a photo when promoting your business, and when permission is a must.  According to gossip rags, Heigl's attorney's reached out to Duane Reade to have the tweet removed, but the request was ignored. So a lawsuit is just around the corner.

Verna points out that the law in New York protects a person's name, portrait, picture and voice, as part of its "Right of Privacy" statute, at Article 5 of the N.Y. Civil Rights Law. And, Verna warns, "courts have construed the portrait/picture provisions of the statute somewhat broadly, to include 'any recognizable likeness, not just an actual photography.'" This could include a sculpture, mannequin, and other three-dimensional "likenesses" may be covered. (Legal Eagle citation: Young v. Greneker Studios, 26 N.Y.Ys. 2d 357 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1941) 

BANKING IT
The celebrity's bank account doesn't matter either. In fact, that could make it worse. A celebrity makes money off of photos and other likenesses. Even if they haven't made a movie in years, their picture can still earn them an income. Society likes to slam celebrities, but they have bills to pay too, and what's different about them than a normal business is, a celebrity pays salaries to those who clean their houses and manage their careers. It costs a lot of money to be a celebrity! So a celebrity may fight to control their image and demand payment. Not all celebrities may be like this, as some may appreciate the added publicity they will get from being spotted using or wearing a #smallbiz product. Some may enjoy supporting small businesses, and may give permission frequently to use a photo. But celebrities like Katherine Heigl, who have a reputation for A. being high and mighty on ethics, and/or B. needing to bank it to increase their income, may not be celebrities you skip getting permission from.

NOT ALL TWEETS ARE INNOCENT
Creating a tweet is very easy. Putting two and two together is how digital marketers and publicists make their money. So when content marketing companies like this one put out headlines like this: "It all started with an innocent tweet", it further blurs the lines of right and wrong, especially when small businesses look to larger businesses with in-house legal teams to set the model of what is standard, assuming that if their lawyers thought it ok, then it must be so.

Plus, everyone knows that celebrities get paid big bucks to tweet. For all we know, Duane Reade knew this would happen, and is enjoying a lot of publicity when big media is covering it. And they are - Forbes, Washington Post, TheWire.com, Gawker, New York Daily News, TMZ, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and many others. And it's Katherine who is getting slammed, and mega corporation Duane Reade who is being positioned as "innocent".

MORAL OF THE STORY
Hey. Maybe a social media person made that mistake at Duane Reade and didn't clear it with Legal first. Or maybe Duane Reade just paid for a $6 million dollar ad campaign. But people have rights, and this country has laws to protect those rights. When you make your money from your persona, you're going to protect it and you will decide who will pay you to endorse their product.

So take warning small businesses: ask permission first. If you get no response, and you still want to post a picture of a celebrity using your business, run it past your lawyer first.

When we launched Tin Shingle, we dug very deep in our #smallbiz souls to realize who our audience was and what type of businesses needed our service. The easy answer to who our audience is, would be, "It's people with storefronts or online shops, and service professionals." Not so obvious however, but equally important are the artisans out there, who may be a musician, an artist, a sculptor, or a designer of one-of-a-kind things. These types of business owners are more passionate and into their art than they are into marketing, and usually aren't obsessing over our message of "Hey! Do XYZ to get the word out about your business!" They are more focused on honing their craft. We wanted to gain their trust and let them know we "got them" right away with our first impression. The good news for us?  Thanks to some planning and design work, by the time our business card landed in their hands, we've done just that. In fact, we have never encountered such a strong positive reaction to a business card. This is the story of how we achieved it:

When planning our cards, we immediately thought that the first impression we would have with artisans (and anyone we encountered) would be through touch. Therefore, the texture of our business card was very important to us. I was designing it, and I'm a lover of paper. I prefer to read the newspaper and hold magazines. I love trade paperback books. So this business card had to feel special in the hands of our potential readers and members. They had to know that Tin Shingle would give them something special in return. 

We came up with the name "Tin Shingle" because we loved the concept of someone hanging their "shingle" (aka store sign) outside of their shop. As for "tin", it's a resilient metal, and so are so many of the small businesses that read our articles, listen to our classes, and dig deeper with membership. When Sabina and I were brainstorming, we could almost feel our brand, even though we are a website and not a storefront. We wanted to touch it, and so wood also became important to us. Wooden business cards were awesome, but too much for our budget.

When I called my usual online digital printer, I stressed the importance of the paper, and asked for paper samples. I've worked with printers for years, and have stood in giant print shops while huge print runs for magazines or sales materials shoot through the printing presses. I've even worked in a blue printing shop for architectural plans! This form of printing is called "offset" printing and is a dinosaur now for business card printing, especially for small businesses like ours. But, my digital guy couldn't give me a straight answer on the paper. What he wouldn't say directly was: "No, we can't do that. Yes, we are giving you our standard paper that thousands of small businesses print on every day and feels the same as anyone else's."

Which honestly is fine for most brands. But we wanted that special feeling. So I speed-dialed my old friend Rick at K2 Printing and almost fainted when his number didn't work. Did they go the way of the dinosaurs!? Oh no! I Googled them next from my mobile phone, and thank goodness, the search gave me a different number. K2 Printing had changed their phone number, but had entered it into Google Places and put it on their Contact Us page (note to all of you with a location...using Google Places is a must!), so Google pulled up the phone number for me for me and I tapped it from my phone. Rick was still there. Only Rick was also offering digital printing, which meant low digital printing prices. However, an added bonus for me, this meant I got my pick of paper, and I had Rick on my side to send me samples and guide me through the perfect paper for our business cards.

Working with the old school of printing means that you are extremely well taken care of. Well, that's Rick's policy at least. When the business card was ready to proof, he sent me a printed sample. But for my picky eye, it wasn't perfect. I forgot to mention the other challenge for our business card: it was an unusual size. We wanted it square with rounded corners, with full color bleed to the edges. That meant that Rick's machine had to cut the cards after they were printed. When this happened, the digital color flaked off the card. So the cut of the card wasn't crisp.

I called Rick, feeling horrible that I was about to be so picky, and asked what he could do. Of course he had a solution: he'd add a layer of acquiesce coating onto the cards to really lock in the color before the cards were cut. But, the sacrifice was that we'd lose the feeling of the paper because the coating would be there. The coating was smooth, like vellum.

I agreed to the coating, and let go my obsession with touching paper. Sabina received her cards in the mail days later and began passing them out to everyone she met. The reaction was amazing. She'd call me from a dinner to tell me how much the person liked the card. This would be from a vendor at a farmers market, to an editor at the Wall Street Journal. Sabina gets out more than I do, and a year and a half later, she is still telling me about the reactions she gets from people touching the card. They love it. When I get out and about, I usually see local business owners and artists. They are a tough sell. After experiencing the happy reaction from the person I give our card to as they turn it over in their hands, anyone from a bakery owner to a car dealership, I now look forward to handing out my business card without feeling pushy.

Our goal was achieved. We wanted trust at the very first touch of our brand. We also wanted to stand out when we handed people the card.  Fortunately, we were able to achieve both.  We knew how to get them, and we kept those points as major factors, even though the easy and expected answer was to design a card and quickly send it to a digital printer online somewhere. The care is good at these digital printers, but even in this digital age, the story of our business card is  a reminder that people still appreciate thought and touch.

PS: The flower pattern on my nails is a nail wrap sticker from Kiss.

If an photo is posted to Instagram without a hashtag, does it make a sound? Barely. And not even your own followers may see it, thanks to Instagram changing their algorithm to not show you pictures chronologically anymore. It mingles with other photos when you include a hashtag into your photo caption. Like #yummy or #nomnomnom for really good food, or #bighairdontcare for a big hair style.

People navigate Instagram by clicking on hashtags of things they are interested in. People make up unique hashtags all the time, and sometimes those hashtags take off.

The digital team at Tin Shingle collects these hashtags and adds them to Tin Shingle's Exclusive Instagram Hashtag Cheat Sheet. Each hashtag is checked to make sure it contains a collection of good photos, and then is added to the list as a recommended hashtag to use. The Instagram Hashtag Cheat Sheet is available to Tin Shingle members only, and are grouped by industry. It's a living guide, so we add to it on a ongoing basis. It's one of many buzz-building tools that come with membership, so check out what you've been missing if you're not a member yet.

If you want to contribute to this Instagram Hashtag Cheat Sheet Guide, you can email your suggestion to member@tinshingle.com. This is good for people who:

• Are having great luck and getting big reach from certain hashtags.
• Are trying to create a movement with a hashtag they made up and want to connect with others on it.

To help you get the most out of Instagram right now, listen to this TuneUp with the Senior Social Media Manager of Marvel, Adri Cowan, who also helps select clients in her social media agency, Rogue Social.

When Barefoot & Chocolate joined Tin Shingle as a member, they immediately took advantage of their the Pitch Whisperer Program. Days later, their edited letter was sent to their intended target -  Elvis Duran and the Morning Show. A flurry of emails later (and even a traffic ticket!), Barefoot & Chocolate was being devoured by Elvis Duran and the Morning Show live on the air.

The Pitch Whisperer Program was created to help small businesses have better success when they are trying to get press for their businesses. In the program, a small business submits the email pitch they are intending to send to a magazine, newspaper, TV show or radio show. Their pitch gets assigned to a Pitch Whisperer, and the edited pitch with recommendations on what to do for the future are sent to the business owner.

But Barefoot & Chocolate took it one step further. When they got the press, they took to the Internet to share their press and spread the word. They utilized their own blogging platform here at Tin Shingle called The #SmallBizDiaries, and wrote about the adventure of getting the press, and getting to the radio studio (they got pulled over for driving in a bus lane!). They can also post it in their Press Portfolio here at Tin Shingle, that is read frequently by people searching for things in search engines.

The #SmallBizDiaries is a blog on Tin Shingle for each member to share their behind the scenes stories and insights into how they are growing their business. It helps the business spread the news to people searching in Google, and gets their brand in front of even more eyes. This is an SEO tactic, and is one of several content marketing opportunities we make available to members of Tin Shingle. Also, because I'm an SEO junkie, I couldn't help but get under the hood of Sasha's blog post, and make edits to improve it SEO-wise. I included my SEO recommendations for members to read in our private Forum where members turn to other members for insight and support.

To learn more about membership with Tin Shingle, please click here.

Here is the clip! You can play it right now!